The Progress of Man from Advanced Commentary to Sophomoric Opinion

February 22, 2016

Baseball season is right around the corner, y'all. The preseason starts in less than two weeks, and then a month later: the ultimate meeting of a guy with a stick and a guy with a rock. Need to spend some cathartic time wearing orange at the Maid, and it can't happen soon enough.

February 20, 2016

I'm trying to find a way to stay engaged in the political process this year, even though I think all the major candidates are complete shit.

So I took a quiz, and it says that I'm 81% in line with Ted Cruz.

Fuck.

Cruz doesn't believe in marriage equality, or in the separation of church and state, which are both very important to me. He's also in favor of de-funding Planned Parenthood, which I see as an unnecessary political stunt that would be harmful to literally millions of people.

But he is a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment and a strong opponent of Obamacare, both of which are right up my alley (meaning that I agree with him on those points).

So, I agree with him on some things, and I disagree with him on others. What the quiz can't tell, though, is that Cruz is an evangelical Christian. Now, on the face of it, I wouldn't have a problem with the president being a Christian (technically, all US presidents so far have been Christians). But an evangelical? That's a whole different stripe. When Cruz speaks, I can tell he was raised in a fundamentalist church kind of atmosphere, and he learned his public speaking there. But there's a closed-mindedness going on there, which I'm pretty sure comes from the same place. I've seen that fundamentalist Christian closed-mindedness completely destroy whole families, creating a powerful inability think independently - something they used to call "brainwashing" back during the cold war, when we were told it's what the Russians would do to us.

So, what to do? Vote for the evangelical? Jeez. I mean, what a horrible choice!

February 07, 2016

PEOPLE. The "Arab Bomb Prank" isn't even a real prank. The "victims" are actors, friends of the "Arabs", or whatever. Also, the story about one of them being shot is straight-up bullshit. Nothing but fake.

Honestly, if you can't tell the difference - if you can't just look at it and see that it's fake - then you need to figure out some way to get smarter. Not everything that's told to you is true.

Of course, I guess if you'll fall for the Magical Old Man in the Sky story, I guess you'll fall for anything.